Take, for instance, the ABC/Washington Post poll out Tuesday morning in the Post. The headline reads Public Option Gains Support - CLEAR MAJORITY NOW BACKS PLAN, by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen. The report on the poll goes into a lot of the breakdowns of how Republicans, Democrats and independents think about the health care issue plodding through Congress by percentage, but the key takeaway from this, which you will see all over MSM news outlets all day, is in this paragraph.
On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)
57-40 now support a public option? I read that and thought there is no way this can be true, especially when we just read from Rasmussen Reports, the polling outfit that actually got the closest to predicting the real outcome of the election last year, that their brand new poll shows support for Obamacare has slipped to 42-54 against the plan.
That's a gigantic swing between the two polls in such a short period of time over essentially the same issue. Time to go to the sampling to see which poll is bogus. Back to the Post. If you keep reading through the seemingly endless analysis by Balz and Cohen about what the results of their numbers mean for Obama, for Congress, and for the country, you get to the ideological makeup used to generate this "poll". Ready?
Only 20 percent of adults identify themselves as Republicans, little changed in recent months, but still the lowest single number in Post-ABC polls since 1983. Political independents continue to make up the largest group, at 42 percent of respondents; 33 percent call themselves Democrats.
ABC News/Washington Post pollsters called just over a thousand people, only found 20% who said they were Republicans, and they think it's news that Obamacare is now winning the day in American public opinion overwhelmingly. I'm stunned. I think I need to go lie down.
Just in case anyone out there is interested in reality, Rasmussen reported that at the end of September of this year, the party breakdown in the country was 32.1% Republican, 37.5% Democrat, and if you lumped the rest into independents, which they certainly aren't, you'd get 30.4% independent. Keep in mind, that in this Rasmussen poll, this is registered voters, not likely voters. If you use likely voters, the spread between Democrats and Republicans gets even tighter as Republicans in general tend historically to be more likely to vote than Democrats. That is, unless you are involved with ACORN, in which case you are likely to vote several times, and encourage all the illegal brothels you've assisted to do the same.
The ABC/Washington Post poll is completely busted. It is fantasy to believe that in this country, there are only 20% self-identified Republicans. And their number of independents at 42%? Those are Democrats, too. Remember, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is an independent. Joe Liebermann is an independent. Most MSM'ers when pinned down claim they are independents. I'm sure there are a few conservatives who make up a tiny portion of that independent percentage, but when the Post runs a story that includes a poll with a sample that askew, I believe we can take some liberties with the rest of their numbers just as easily as they can.
On Monday, there was the U.S. Chamber Of Commerce hoax that got by CNBC, Reuters, and by extension, because of carrying the Reuters wire service, The New York Times and Washington Post. Rush Limbaugh was serially slandered by MSM, who gleefully attributed to him comments never spoken by Limbaugh in order to make him too toxic for NFL ownership. Instead of MSM actually checking out the alleged quotes to see if they were actually uttered by Limbaugh, they waited until the Sabotage Rush mission was accomplished before half-heartedly issuing an oops, in some cases, and not even that much in many more. The balloon boy hoax sucked in MSM. It's not been one of American journalism's high water marks this month for credibility and trustworthiness.
With this bogus ABC/Post poll, how will the rest of MSM report it Tuesday? Will Wolf Blitzer dive into the sample ratios on the Situation Room and report that the poll is busted? Or will he report it as news, and then get some Democratic hack like Paul Begala or James Carville on to gloat about how it means certain doom for Republicans in the Senate?
Will Joe Scarborough on MSNBC figure this out? Or will this poll be fodder for the prime time horror show that is Shuster/Matthews/Schultz/Olbermann/Maddow?
My prediction? The White House will tout this poll early and often, and force the networks to cover it, desperate to claim momentum where there is none. If not President Obama himself, Press Secretary Robert "Dilbert" Gibbs will bring it up in the morning briefing. And will the numbers be challenged by anyone in the press corps? Not likely.
Just keep in mind, you read it here first. The ABC/Washington Post poll on support for Obamacare is as phony as the fraudulant U.S. Chamber of Commerce "spokesperson" who tried to claim Monday that the Chamber had a change of heart and now was on board with the cap and tax legislation.
One more point. As long as goofing around with numbers and percentages seem to be the order of the day, the 2008 election saw 129.4 million votes cast for president, which is the most accurate and recent likely voter data we have. If you take 20% of the 129.4 million voters, you get 25.9 million Republicans, using Washington Post/ABC polling methodology. That's just a statistical smidgeon more than Rush Limbaugh's 25 million listeners per week as cited by Chris Matthews and Talker's Magazine in March of this year. So I guess it's safe to assume that every Republican in the country listens to Rush. That explains the left's Rush persecution last week.
And here I thought Karl Rove was the one we all got our marching orders from.